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Dear Colleagues,
I am very pleased to announce that, by popular request, and by special
arrangement with her publisher, the University of Chicago Press,
Professor Beth Levin of Northwestern University has allowed the verb
index from her recent book _English Verb Classes and Alternations_ to
be made available in electronic form on the University of Michigan
Linguistics Archive for anonymous FTP.
The file
evca93.index [for English Verb Classes and Alternations '93]
is located in the directory
linguistics/texts/indices
in the Michigan linguistics archives. The Internet address is
linguistics.archive.umich.edu
The file itself is only 89411 bytes in size (not all that big) and is
an ASCII (text) file that may be downloaded in text mode by ftp.
I'm sending another LINGUIST posting (which, in the best of all
possible worlds, would immediately follow this one) that contains
somewhat detailed and updated instructions for getting stuff from the
archives via FTP (there have been a few changes), with the verb index
file as a particular example.
You may recall Daniel Seely's review of Levin's book on LINGUIST last
year (Vol.4-1102 and 4-1111]). I quote a few relevant passages:
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"Beth Levin's _English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary
Investigation_ is an excellent reference book. It presents syntactic
and semantic information which is valuable and easy to use. The book
is rich in well-organized data (there are thousands of entries in the
verb index and the bulk of the book is made up of dozens of diathesis
alternations and verb classes), it is thoroughly documented (there are
some 800 references), and it has important theoretical implications
(nicely traced in the Introduction). It is, in short, an impressive
accomplishment and it has become an indispensable part of my
linguistics library.
...
"As Levin explains (and I quote here somewhat extensively to give
the reader a feel for Levin's very accessible style):
'If the syntactic properties of a verb indeed follow in large part
from its meaning, then it should be possible to identify general
principles that derive the behavior of a verb from its meaning.
Given such principles, the meaning of a verb will clearly have a
place in its lexical entry, but it is possible that the entry
will need to contain little more. And since a word's meaning is
necessarily idiosyncratic, the inclusion of a word's meaning in
its lexical entry conforms to Bloomfield's characterization of
the lexicon as a locus of idiosyncrasy.' (p. 11)
...
"As a final note, let me point out that although my comments have
focussed on (some of) Levin's theoretical underpinnings, I have found
many practical uses for the book. It has helped in making up exercise
sets for syntax, semantics, and morphology classes, for example, it
made checking the verbs of example sentences in a psycholinguistic
study much easier, and it has been invaluable (my students tell me)
for creating exercises of various sorts in TESOL. It is, after all, a
reference work and like all good references it is limited only by the
imagination of its user. At one point Levin states '... I hope that
[this book] will be a valuable resource for linguists and researchers
inrelated fields.' A hope most certainly realized!"
---------------
I might add that I agree enthusiastically with Prof. Seely's assessment,
and that I find the idea of making more of this wonderful resource
available in electronic form very exciting.
The file itself includes 51 lines of introductory material, which I
reproduce below to indicate the conditions under which it is released:
---------------
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Index from ENGLISH VERB CLASSES AND ALTERNATIONS: A
PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION, by Beth Levin, published by The
University of Chicago Press, (c) 1993 by The University of
Chicago. All rights reserved.
This text may be used and shared in accordance with the
fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be
archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that
this entire notice is carried and provided that the
University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is
charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or
republication of this text on other terms, in any medium,
requires both the consent of the author and the University
of Chicago Press.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This file contains the index from ENGLISH VERB CLASSES AND
ALTERNATIONS: A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION, by Beth Levin,
published by The University of Chicago Press, copyright (c)
The University of Chicago, 1993. More detailed information on
the verb classes and alternations referenced by section number
in this index is found in the book itself.
Any work, published or unpublished, based in whole or in part
on the use of this index should acknowledge ENGLISH VERB
CLASSES AND ALTERNATIONS. The author would appreciate being
informed of such work or other significant uses of the index.
Beth Levin
Department of Linguistics
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL, USA 60208-4090
(b-levinnwu.edu)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Verb Index
The index includes an alphabetical listing of the verbs referred to in
Part I and Part II of the book. Each verb is followed by a list of the
sections that it is mentioned in. There has been no attempt to
distinguish and give separate entries to the different senses of a verb.
Similarly, there is only one entry in the index for verbs that are
homographs. For instance, the entry in the index for _jar_ includes a
list of all sections discussing _jar_, whether in the sense of ``put in
a jar'' or in the sense of ``have a disagreeable effect on.''
---------------
This introductory material is then followed by the verb index itself,
consisting of one line for each of the 3104 verbs indexed in the book.
Each line contains the verb itself, together with all of the section
numbers in the book that refer to it.
For instance, the second verb in the list is "abash". Here's its
listing: abash 1.2.5, 2.13.4, 31.1
This indicates that it is referenced in three places:
o first, 1.2.5, which, on consulting the table of contents of the
printed book, can be readily broken down into:
Part I Alternations (Categories 1 through 9)
Category 1 Transitivity Alternations
Class 1.2 Unexpressed Object Alternations
SubClass 1.2.5 PRO-arb Object Alternation [page 37]
o and 2.13.4, which likewise breaks down into:
Part I Alternations (Categories 1 through 9)
Category 2 Alternations Involving Arguments Within the VP
Class 2.13 Possessor-Attribute Factoring Alternations
SubClass 2.13.4 Possessor Subject (transitive) [page 76]
o and, finally, 31.1, which breaks down into:
Part II Verb Classes (Categories 9 through 57)
Category 31 Psych-Verbs (Verbs of Psychological State)
Class 31.1 "Amuse" Verbs [page 189]
The information in the explanation above is culled completely from the
table of contents of the printed book; the text of the book itself is
naturally *far* more perspicuous, and therefore this electronic index
is ultimately intended to make possessing the actual book all that much
more attractive and useful, which is only fair. But having the list of
verbs online also means one can reference categories and lists directly
(from inside a wordprocessor if necessary), and search for correlations
and other phenomena ad lib, using ordinary text tools like grep or awk.
For a linguist interested in English, this represents a far more useful
computing resource than even the most complete thesaurus.
Following are the first and last 5 lines (52-56 and 3151-3155) of the
index proper, to show how the file is structured.
---------------
abandon 51.2
abash 1.2.5, 2.13.4, 31.1
abate 1.1.2.1, 45.4
abduct 2.2, 2.3.2, 10.5
abhor 2.10, 2.13.1, 2.13.2, 2.13.3, 31.2
... [ ca 3094 lines omitted ] ...
zigzag 7.8, 51.3.2
zing 2.3.4, 7.8, 43.2
zip 2.5.1, 2.5.2, 7.2, 22.4
zipcode 7.2, 9.9
zoom 7.8, 51.3.2
---------------
I believe we all owe a debt of thanks to Prof. Levin, and to the
University of Chicago Press, for this innovative contribution to the
general edification of the profession. It is to be hoped that other
authors and publishers will follow their example.
Let me conclude with a commercial for the archives:
I would like to suggest that anyone else with interesting indices,
word lists, texts (especially tagged or otherwise value-added),
course syllabi, exams, classroom problems, field data, paper drafts
or offprints, or any other material you would like to make available
to the linguistic profession as a whole is welcome to put them on
the archives. Indeed, we need more such material desperately, since
we have very few contributions. Why reinvent the wheel? Put your
material on the archives.
If you're interested in contributing anything, go ahead and upload it
to the linguistics/uploads directory on linguistics.archive.umich.edu.
If you're unsure about how (or whether) to do that, send me mail at
jlawlerumich.edu
and we can discuss it.
The computer age has overtaken us, folks, and we are falling behind
daily. It's time to start making accommodations with the realities
of the situation.
Cheers,
-John Lawler jlawlerumich.edu
Program in Linguistics University of Michigan
Linguistic Archivist linguistics.archive.umich.edu
_____________________________________________________________
P.S. The following software package has just been placed on the
archives, for those are interested in playing with English
sound symbolism. Download it in BINARY mode and de-archive
it with PKUNZIP.EXE.
linguistics/software/dos/monosyl.zip 7/13/94 121,338 Compressed
John Lawler, University of Michigan <jlawlerumich.edu>
A primitive but relatively complete and usable system for investigating
sound-symbolism in English monosyllables. Includes an indexed database
of over 5000 English monosyllabic words, parsed into "assonance" and
"rime" (as specified by Bolinger (1950), and as used in Rhodes & Lawler
(1979) and Lawler (1989)), and software tools for indexing and searching
it (with TurboPascal source code).
References:
Bolinger (1950) Rime, Assonance and Morpheme Analysis. Word 6
Rhodes & Lawler (1981) Athematic Metaphors. CLS 17
Lawler (1989) Women, Men, and Bristly Things: The Phonosemantics of the
BR- Assonance in English. Michigan Working Papers in Linguistics I.1
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